WAP-Enabling a Website with PHP3 - Conclusions (
Page 4 of 4 )
It's dead easy if you follow
the path of separating the data management from the presentation. Our approach
works fine for us and we can easily add features to the WAP part of the site to
bring it up to a similar spec to the main HTML site. Whether we would want to is
another matter. WML is pretty ropey and it's my own opinion that people used to
HTML browsers will be extremely frustrated if they get suckered by the hype
about surfing the net from your mobile phone. Screens the size of typical mobile
phones are well-nigh unusable and devices with more real estate will have enough
power to run HTML browsers. The data compression of the WAP protocol is another
thing - couple that with HTML and you will have something much more interesting.
The drawbacks that I've seen from using php3 like this are minor. The
htmlspecialchars() function in php3 doesn't deal correctly with the WML
entities that need escaping, but I intend to write my own version and put it in
the stdwaphdr.tpl include file. If php3 finds a syntax error it tries
to be nice and tell the user via the browser - but it outputs HTML not WML while
it does it. Hardly a show-stopper if you have got your php3 code right in the
first place, but should it happen then the user's browser will choke. I'm told
that WAP phones are even less reliable than Windows at the moment: an article in
this month's Personal Computer World describes having to remove the battery from
the phone when it gets wedged.
It works, it's simple and I'm sure we will be doing more with this.
Mike Banahan, GBdirect, 22nd April 2000
Update 22nd May 2000
If you want a copy of the templates used on
the wap site, I have prepared a gzipped tarfile of them
which you can use for information. Note that the server will serve them up as
text/plain - just click on `save as' and drop the file into an appropriate
directory before unpacking it. The files will unpack into the current directory,
so make sure you put the archive somewhere sensible first. If you spot any
errors, I'd love to know.
This article copyright GBdirect Ltd 2000. All rights reserved.
Reprinted from http://www.gbdirect.co.uk/ with
permission.
